Khan wrote extensively on Al-Qaeda, Taliban and the heavy fighting among tribes in Waziristan, where he was found dead six months after his reporting contradicted Pakistan's official statements.
[6] On 7 August 2001, the Committee to Protect Journalists wrote a letter to the Pakistan military dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, after Hayatullah Khan had gone into hiding when the government threatened him with arrest because of his reports about skirmishes among tribes in the Waziristan region.
[7] His dead body was discovered in June 2006, six months after he had been kidnapped by five unidentified gunmen on 5 December 2005, which his brother Haseenullah had witnessed.
[9] Just days before his kidnapping, the Pakistani authorities had said an al-Qaeda commander they named as Abu Hamza Rabia had been killed with four others in a blast at an alleged militant hideout in North Waziristan.
The official version was that bomb-making materials had exploded by accident, but locals said the men were killed by a missile fired from an unmanned US drone.